The importance of effective data sharing and reuse to funders and others supporting research

E-mail: a.macfarlane@wellcome.org Key points • Wellcome requires grantees to submit and maintain an Outputs Management Plan, the quality of which have improved over time. • To stimulate re-use of data, the Wellcome Data Re-use Prizes were launched in 2018. • The Wellcome prizes did not receive the volume of submissions expected, one possible reason being the lack of clarity about the time required to produce a worthy entry. • Researchers identify publishers as the source relied upon to make data open, and there are steps publishers can take to help. • However, there is also a role for funders to unlock the potential of data.

benefit. These are compelling arguments for why championing data re-use should be a key priority for all research funders. At Wellcome, we have a policy that is designed to support the researchers we fund in maximising the value of their research outputs, including data, software and materials (Wellcome, 2017a). We require grant applicants to complete an Outputs Management Plan at the point of application, and encourage them to maintain this as a living document throughout the lifetime of their grant (Wellcome, 2017b). Over recent yearsas requirements for such plans have become more commonplace and research institutions have provided increasing support for data management (Teperek & Dunning, 2018, Angelaki & Jones, 2019) -it has been pleasing to see the quality of these plans steadily improve. In September 2020, Wellcome initiated a pilot to provide a support service to further support our funded researchers and institutions to improve the quality of Output Management Plans. Wellcome also works to develop and sustain the infrastructures required to support the quality and longevity of data sharing. We have provided long-term funding to several key data repositories, databases and tools, for example the Single Cell Gene Expression Atlas (Papatheodorou et al., 2020), and are working actively with other funders through fora such as the Global Biodata Coalition to try to ensure such resources have long-term sustainable funding (Anderson, 2017).
However, these activities all focus on encouraging and supporting the sharing of data, and not on stimulating its re-use. Our policy refers to our expectation that research data be re-used in a responsible manner, but we felt our activities lacked an explicit focus on highlighting and encouraging data re-use. We looked to some other examples of incentives for data re-use for inspiration, for example the Economic and Social Research Council's Secondary Data Analysis Initiative, which is an open call for grant proposals (UK Research and Innovation, 2021), and the New England Journal of Medicine's SPRINT Data Analysis Challenge, which offered a cash prize for novel findings based on the dataset underlying the SPRINT clinical trial, as well as the opportunity to publish in NEJM (NEJM, 2017).
We launched the Wellcome Data Re-use Prizes in antimicrobial resistance and malaria in November 2018 to reward either new insights or tools that help other researchers to re-use data (Wellcome, 2018). We ran the two prizes concurrently, with each focusing on an area of strategic importance to Wellcome at the time: antimicrobial resistance, and malaria. Entrants were asked to generate a new insight, tool or health application from the available data, and the winner of each prize received £15,000 with 2 runners-up each receiving £5,000. We also offered the winners the opportunity to publish in Wellcome Open Research.

The antimicrobial resistance prize
This prize highlighted the AMR Register, an open data resource launched by Wellcome's Drugresistant Infections programme and led by the Open Data Institute. The register has collected information from AMR surveillance programmes generated by the pharmaceutical industry. The antimicrobial resistance prize specifications and all entries are available through Synapse (Synapse, 2019a).

The malaria prize
This prize highlighted the Malaria Atlas Project, a Repository of Open Access Data (ROAD-MAP), launched with support from Wellcome, and then funding from the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation. The repository contains a wealth of data on malaria risk and intervention coverage. The malaria prize specifications and all entries are available through Synapse (Synapse 2019b).
The judging panels were impressed by the calibre of the entries we received to both prizes, but there were lessons to be learned from this endeavour. We were keen to market this prize to PhD students or postdocs, targeting researchers early in their careers in the hope of embedding data re-use skills and enthusiasm in their research, and were pleased that two of the prize winners were individual PhD students, and one a whole team of PhD students, with PhD students involved in other winning entries too. However, we did not receive the volume of applications from our target audience as we'd hoped, and received feedback that the generosity of the prizes we offered was disproportionately large compared to the type of findings or tools we were hoping to see, and therefore many prospective entrants felt they wouldn't have the time to produce a worthy entry. And at the end of the day, positioning these prizes as work that could be done alongside researchers' or students' existing workloads may have inadvertently sent a message that data re-use is "nice to have" rather than a crucial part of an effective research enterprise.
Of course, in order to be viable, initiatives such as these rely on relevant data being available, having untapped potential, and being easily reusable i.e. well curated and annotated. But for data to be reusable, it must first be findable and accessible! Published articles are a useful signpost to the existence of data. Publishers have a key role to play here by prompting researchers to ensure that the data they share are discoverable and reusable. The State of Open Data 2020 (Digital Science, 2020) reported that when researchers were asked which source they would rely on for help making data from their most recent research report open, "Publisher" was the most commonly selected response. Some examples of actions that publishers could take are: many issues are common across all fields of research and that there is much to be learned from other disciplines.

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Funders including Wellcome are working more and more on encouraging data sharing -Further focus needs to be put on stimulating the re-use of research data once shared -Wellcome ran data re-use prizes in 2018/19 to incentivise data re-use -Publishers as well as funders have a key role to play in supporting the research community to share data and maximise its value MacFarlane Page 5 Learn Publ. Author manuscript; available in PMC 2022 January 25.